Paperless Policies: The Benefits of Online Car Insurance

It used to be that whenever you got yourself a nice, new insurance policy, you wound up having enough paperwork mailed to your home to print a phone book for half your city. You received your declarations page (dec page), your insurance cards, your policy, and a few ads. To go along with this, your insurance policy brought with it a monthly bill that began to arrive which involved more paperwork. In short, for the insurance company, writing new policies meant buying more paper, killing more trees and paying more for postage.

In the 21st century, however, innovative insurance companies have begun offering a way for customers to “go green” that also has the benefit of saving the insurance company money. Other benefits to going paperless with your auto insurance policy include:

• It’s easy being green: Signing up for a paperless policy saves the insurance company from having to mail you a nearly endless supply of paper documents. This saves you from having to store (or shred) them, saves postage, and saves thousands of trees per year. When customers need documents, such as their insurance card or a copy of their bill, they can go online and print them out directly, thereby only using precisely as much paper as needed and not a single sheet more.
• Availability: If you forget or lose your insurance documentation, it’s easy to go online and have it reprinted from virtually anywhere. This convenient feature can save a lot of stress or worry.
• Security: Not having a nearly endless stream of paperwork being mailed to your home means additional security. With a paperless insurance policy, all of your information is stored online on encrypted drives for your protected. Customers are required to login to the site and verify their identity before they can view or print any documents.
• Time Savings: Instead of having to hop on the phone, wait to speak with a customer service rep, and then having to wait up to a week for any needed paperwork to arrive in the email, customers with a paperless policy can get their documents immediately through the Internet. In addition, statements are received in a timelier manner with e-mail notifications to keep the customer abreast of any changes to their policy or the insurance company that they should know about.
• Money savings: As mentioned before, customers that go green save an insurance company a good deal of money in paper products. This savings can, in many states, be passed along to the consumer who is making the change. This is yet another discount offered by some insurance companies in order to encourage their customers to do the right thing.

If you are interested in taking advantage of a paperless auto insurance policy, contact your insurance agent to see what options are available for you. Not all companies will have paperless auto insurance policies yet, some are still getting used to the idea and only offer their customers a partial option such as receiving their monthly statements via e-mail.